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My old coworkers have moved on entirely, probably assuming I quit and left the group chat because I didn’t want the awkwardness of goodbyes. Caleb doesn’t even know I quit. As far as he knows, I’m just gone, and he hasn’t noticed enough to ask why.

I tell myself there’s an explanation. He’s busy with the baby. He’s exhausted, his wife’s exhausted, nobody has the bandwidth to check on the sister who mostly shows up for holidays anyway.

I run through every generous version of this I can think of, and none of them quite land, because even during the worst stretches of our relationship, Caleb has never gone two weeks without at least a meme in the group chat or a random text asking if I’ve eaten today, some small proof of life that costs him nothing and always used to come anyway.

By the end of the second week, the generous versions stop working entirely. What’s left underneath them is a much uglier thought I can’t stop circling. What if something happened to him? What if he’s the one who needs someone checking in, and nobody is doing it because everybody assumes somebody else already is, the same way everybody probably assumed someone would notice I was gone.

I find Artem in the study that evening, papers spread out in front of him the way they always are, and I don’t bother easing into it.

“I need to call my brother.”

He looks up, face unreadable. “Why?”

“Because it’s been two weeks and he hasn’t texted me once, and normally he does, and I need to know he’s okay.” My voice comes out tighter than I mean it to. “I’m not asking you to let me go. I’m not asking for anything except five minutes on the phone to make sure my brother’s alive.”

“You think something’s happened to him?”

“I don’t know what to think.” I cross my arms, less out of defiance now and more because I need somewhere to put my hands. “You’ve had people watching my phone for two weeks. You’d know if something happened to him before I would. So either tell me he’s fine, or let me hear it from him myself.”

He sets his pen down. “Nobody’s flagged anything on him. No unusual activity, no reason for concern that we’ve found.”

“Then why hasn’t he called me?” My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate that it does, hate that two weeks of holding it together comes apart this easily in front of him. “He’s never gone this long without checking in. Never. Not once in my whole life.”

Artem’s quiet for a moment, weighing something I can’t read on his face, and I brace myself for the same flat no I’ve gotten from him about everything else since I got here.

“One call,” he says instead. “Monitored. You don’t tell him where you are, who I am, or anything about this house. You tell him you’re fine and you needed to hear his voice. That’s all.”

Relief hits so fast it makes my knees feel strange, like something’s been let out of them that was holding me up without my noticing. “Okay. Yes. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” He pushes back from the desk and reaches for the phone in the drawer where it always lives now. “If he asks questions you can’t answer without giving something away, I end the call. No warning, no explanation. I’ll take it.”

“Understood.”

He unlocks it and hands it over, and my hands are shaking harder than I expect them to be as I pull up Caleb’s contact, his photo from three Thanksgivings ago staring back at me, mid-laugh, Poppy not even born yet in that version of our lives.

Artem doesn’t step out of the room. He doesn’t pretend to give me privacy either. He leans against the edge of the desk with his arms crossed, close enough to hear every word.

My thumb hovers over the call button longer than it needs to, and for one long second I’m more scared of what I might find out than I am of anything that’s happened to me since I first walked into 12A.

I glance up at Artem once, some part of me wanting a nod, permission, anything to make this feel less like standing on the edge of something I can’t take back. He doesn’t offer either.

I press call, and it rings once, twice, three times, each one stretching longer than the last, and I hold my breath through every single one of them.

10

HARPER

The line connects on the fourth ring, and for one full second there’s nothing but noise on the other end, a crowd roaring, an announcer’s voice rising over it, before Caleb’s voice cuts through. My pulse is already loud in my own ears before he even finishes his first word.

“Hey! Sorry, one sec.” The sound of him moving—a door, maybe—the roar dropping to a dull rumble instead of filling the whole call. “What’s up?”

Not “where have you been.” Not “are you okay.”

Just what’s up, and my stomach drops the second I hear how easy it sounds coming out of him, like this is any other Tuesday, like two weeks of silence hasn’t happened at all on his end of things, like nothing about this call needed to feel different from any other call we’ve ever had.

“Hey.” My throat’s already tight. “I just wanted to check in. It’s been a minute since we talked.”

“Yeah, it’s been busy over here.” Someone shouts something in the background, and I hear him half-turn away from the phone to shout something back, muffled, before he comes back to me. “Poppy’s teething; it’s been a whole thing. You good?”